3 June – 13 Sepetmber 2024
Old Wine Cellar
Spier Wine Farm, Stellenbosch
Persistence of Memory
An exhibition of ceramics denoting time, texture and memory
A new edition of an annual ceramics exhibition, which opens at Spier on 3 June 2024, is an exploration of time, texture and memory – both the personal and the collective.
Clay has memory.
Clay is a material formed from sedimentary particles as the result of the erosion of the earth’s crust over vast spans of time. Memories of place and time are embedded in its fine grains of rock, and as the clay is shaped into vessels, its form takes on new memories and meaning. Returned by human action into its rock-hard state, ceramic objects reveal the history of the clay from which they were made.
Spier’s annual ceramics exhibition this year takes its title from Salvador Dali’s ‘The Persistence of Memory (La Persistència de la Memòria)’ (1931). The exhibition celebrates the Surrealist fascination with the power of the object, and contrasts hardness and softness, functionality and aesthetics – while flirting with the relativity of space, time and memory.